More news and blogs for the weekend. Monday and Tuesday there will be new original works that will be posted.
- The New Recommendations for Sun Exposure — Responsible time in the sun is important in order that we make Vitamin D the way nature intended. Vitamin D is an important nutrient that we need for good mental health.
- Sharon Salzberg: Stress Relief: How Silence Can Help Us Unplug — Huffington Post — Sometimes our issue seems to be an excess of technology, but actually it is an excess of distractedness, an inability to settle and simply be.
- Stopping Pain Without Drugs — New York Times — As a non-surgeon practicing at the busiest orthopedic surgery hospital in the country, Dr. Vijay Vad stands out. Instead of sending his patients to surgery, his goal is to keep them out of it.
- Recovery and the Conspiracy of Hope — Pat Deegan (was reminded of this piece on Truly Noodled) — So it is not our job to pass judgment on who will and will not recover from mental illness and the spirit breaking effects of poverty, stigma, dehumanization, degradation and learned helplessness. Rather, our job is to participate in a conspiracy of hope. It is our job to form a community of hope which surrounds people with psychiatric disabilities. It is our job to create rehabilitation environments that are charged with opportunities for self-improvement. It is our job to nurture our staff in their special vocations of hope. It is our job to ask people with psychiatric disabilities what it is they want and need in order to grow and then to provide them with good soil in which a new life can secure its roots and grow. And then, finally, it is our job to wait patiently, to sit with, to watch with wonder, and to witness with reverence the unfolding of another person’s life. — There is a post on Pat Deegan here, that has some good videos and links to some of her work.
- Also from Truly Noodled a work of brilliance I was not familiar with: Social Worker Personality Disorder — satire, but hilariously spot on in the opinion of this ex-social worker